What if the United States has been waging the wrong war against the wrong enemy for the last 13 years in Afghanistan?

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who spent more than a decade covering Afghanistan since 2001, concludes just that in her new book, “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014.”

Gall told “On the Radar” that Pakistan – not Afghanistan – has been the United States’ real enemy.

And while Gall’s “book” might be easily dismissed as irrelevant warmongering, it echoes a narrative that was crafted by some of the most notorious policy makers in the US and promoted widely in 2011 across the Western media. This included the BBC’s documentary, “Secret Pakistan,” from which it appears Gall is deriving her premise.

Unraveling the Propaganda

The documentary “Secret Pakistan” can be summed up with two very telling quotes. The first is from Sherard Cowper-Coles, a British diplomat who served as the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2009-2010, before that as ambassador to Israel and Saudi Arabia, and now the international business development director of British defense contractor BAE Systems. He claims during the BBC documentary that (44:00):

“…the real military threat is the Taliban – a serious insurgency that’s got nothing to do with Bin Laden. Bin Laden, in operational terms, is utterly spectacularly irrelevant.”

Quite clearly this contradicts the “war on terror” narrative peddled to Western audiences for over a decade and instead suggests that current US, British and NATO operation in Afghanistan has more to do with Western interests in the region than fighting the alleged perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 attack on Washington and New York City.

The next important quote comes toward the end of the documentary where former CIA officer and current fellow at the corporate-funded think-tank, Brookings Institution, Bruce Riedel (57:35) claims:

“…there is probably no worst nightmare for America, for Europe, for the world in the 21st century than a Pakistan that is out of control, under the influence of extremist Islamist forces armed with nuclear weapons.”

This comment, however, is not as straight forward or as truthful as Cowper-Coles’. However, if one realizes that this destabilization Riedel is hinting at is actually the work of the US and NATO done as a pretext to intervene more directly in Pakistan, then it becomes truly telling – and we see the BBC documentary, along with Gall’s recent book, as yet more examples of a corporate-media conjured casus belli.